Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Front-line workers in health, education, justice and transport have had to deal with a system that has had its budget cut to the bone. The workload and work environment has gotten worse. Pay has decreased and conditions have deteriorated. Public sector workers have had €12 billion taken from their pay while they work an additional 15 million hours a week. New entrants since January 2011 start on a pay scale that is on average 10% less than their workmates. The Government has no plan to address these issues. There is no commitment to equal pay for equal work. The mantra that the Lansdowne Road agreement is the only game in town just does not hold. There is now a clear need for a new pay deal built upon fairness and equality for workers. What the vast majority of workers want and deserve is the fair and timely unwinding of pay cuts, and pay restoration. We know that cannot be achieved overnight but it can be timelined, which needs effective dialogue and the formation of a new pay agreement which lays out a clear, sensible path to the provision of full pay restoration. In Sinn Féin's view, this must also be a process that prioritises those on low and middle incomes. It must ensure pay equality for post-2011 entrants, beginning with the restoration of certain allowances for nurses, non-consultant doctors, teachers and gardaí. Sinn Féin, in our alternative budget, allowed for this. The Government and Fianna Fáil did not. Any new agreement must also ensure the right to access the State's industrial relations machinery to An Garda Síochána and the Defence Forces. It must also deliver a reduction in agency work and replace it with permanent public sector contracts.

There is a notion, peddled by their detractors, that public sector workers are a protected species. This may be so for some high earners but the vast majority of public sector workers are on low and middle incomes and they are absolutely crucial for the development of our public services. These ongoing cynical efforts to divide public and private sector workers must be repudiated. We need a strong, properly funded, resourced public sector because it is crucial to genuine economic and social progress. An integral step to achieving that, if the Taoiseach believes in it, which I doubt, is to ensure that those working in the public sector enjoy equitable pay, conditions and certainty. Private sector workers deserve this also. Despite the Taoiseach's resistance thus far and Deputy Micheál Martin's attempts to appear more hard line than the Taoiseach, will the Taoiseach accept the very real need for urgent dialogue with the public sector?

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